


A Demon I Once Loved- the horror story of villain!beth

by thephantompoet (typewriteronfire)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, villain!beth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-09 22:59:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2001216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typewriteronfire/pseuds/thephantompoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there was a villain!beth crack theory that fixed itself in my mind. talk to alisonisthegreateststar I know nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. there’s something in the craft room/the night breathes aloud

Alison Hendrix doesn’t like to visit the craft room anymore. It still smells like alcohol and dry glue, as if her shame is permanently etched into every texture of the place. It’s just her luck, really. Everything has continuously gone wrong since Beth came to her door that fateful night; stony and entirely beautiful in a way Alison has never been able to see herself.

 Beth’s trembling lips had mirrored Alison’s own as they spoke a dangerous truth in the dark, on the porch, the automatic light flickering restlessly above their heads. It seems almost comical, looking back on it now. 

 _A clone, okay,_  Alison had thought, standing at her front door in pink checked pyjamas, hysterical past the point of insanity,  _that really isn’t something you hear every day._

It’d taken more than three bottles of a fine red to come to grips with that one.

No, Alison thinks, the craft room is certainly a grave for her sanity. She’d do well to stay away. She spent hours there with Beth in the months after that first visit, drinking expensive wine and breaking craft supplies by making out feverishly on the table. The thought makes her shiver with a subdued grief.

Alison Hendrix knows exactly what comes next in these memories: Sarah Manning, wearing Beth’s dead skin as if it was a costume.

Yes, she thinks with a cold cynicism, Beth became a character, used only for that street rat’s perfect heist.

A sob builds in her chest. Alison has always been one for blaming herself. 'If only she knew… If only she’d seen.'

But how could Beth have just left her behind like that? There is anger, too, eating up guilt with endless appetite.There is no greater abandonment than suicide, Beth's complete offering of body and soul to the cold train tracks of Huxley station. It makes her feel sick.

But Alison isn’t blind, not even to memory. She can see exactly how her and Beth were a messy couple, the whole awful affair a desperate plea for affection, something Alison had never really felt with her husband. It was survival.

She’d always kissed Beth with a breathlessness and desperation that felt more like drowning than flying.

But tonight the craft room is calling to her, unfortunately not metaphorically. It breathes in the darkness, the door like a huge, pale, unblinking eye.

There are noises coming from within it, a scraping noise accompanied by a footstep rhythm that sets Alison’s heart beating frantically in her ears. There’s somebody in her house.

The terror is freezing her bones and whispering in her mind. She rehearses possible scenarios in her mind.  _Don’t hurt me; my children are sleeping!_ Or will she be more assertive?  _I’m warning you. I’m armed. Touch a single hair on my head and it will be the last thing you ever do._

Alison tiptoes to the kitchen, this frenzied monologue running through her mind. When she reaches for the glittering line of knives held against her pastel painted wall the house seems to hold its breath. The metal leaving the magnetic strip makes a grating sound that rings loudly into the darkness, Alison’s eyes are wide and all animal in dim light from the streetlights outside the window. The craft room wants her. There is somebody there.

She holds the knife in front of her with stiff, shaking arms.  _How dare you come into my home and touch my glitter!_ Alison is drawing closer to something inevitable. The room looks at her with open distain; ‘come in’ it seems to say. ‘There’s someone in your house…’

            “As if I don’t know that,” She finds herself whispering. The sound makes her jump.

 _Am I going mad?_ The door doesn’t move. She’s five paces away, three, and then two. It looms in her vision with awful clarity. The sounds within have stopped. The house lurches in silence.

Alison Hendrix’s shaking hand reaches for the doorknob; she turns it, pushing the wood into the gloom. The knife leads her movements, like a conductors baton that seeks only to kill and maim. She reaches into the unknown darkness and fumbles for the light switch.  _There’s someone in my house._

The room is breathing fabric, glitter and paper into her hair. Alison almost reaches up to brush the phantom craft supplies away.  _Just do it, Hendrix, turn the goddamn light on._

She does.

The bulbs illuminate the room so brightly that it is nothing but a searing flash in her mind. Alison blinks wildly.  _Am I dead, have they killed me, why can’t I see?_ When she finally does, the purple blur of past light leaving her vision, she is rendered mute in fear and shock. A figure is sitting on the table in the centre of the room, her dark silhouette lanky and arrogant even in stillness.

            “B-beth?”

It comes out as a choked question, a statement really. Alison knows it’s her, even as she turns to reveal a face speckled in blood. It’s sprayed horrifically up one cheek, lightly smeared under an eye so fierce that Alison takes an involuntary step backwards.

            “What h-happened to you?”

The stranger unfolds herself from the craft table; it really is her, Beth Childs, and walks, no, glides, towards the tiny, trembling woman in the doorway. Nobody else had ever looked at Alison like that, not since the train.

The relief flooding Alison’s veins suddenly freezes as Beth draws closer and pulls a gun out her waistband. She is no longer sure of anything; somehow nearly certain that this woman would shoot her if the need arose. Beth gestures smoothly with the charcoal grey weapon, eyes flashing in half shadow.  _Who is this stranger I used to love with everything I had? She wears the face of an angel but moves like my worse nightmare._

The bloody face is angular and beautiful, her lips parting to utter a purred and threatening command. Alison trembles with fear and grief, amplifying the words to a scream inside her mind.

            “Close the door behind you."

~~~


	2. she’s not afraid of me but she is afraid of something

The hinges of the craft room door have seen better days; they grate brutally in the silence when Alison pushes it closed. Beth whips her head around at the sound with something akin to a snarl.

            “ _Quietly!”_

Alison is quick to nod in assurance, breathing out shakily.

            “Yes, yes. Of course. I’m sorry.”

            “Just- stop talking, Alison please.”

Alison flinches at the sound of her name, so different in Beth’s mouth than it used to be. Hell, the cop had always called her Ali, playfully, with every smirk coating the syllables with non-committal affection.  Now it just sounds dark, like a threat; as shiny and cold as the firearm Beth is still holding with intent.

 Beth is poised, rigid now, every muscle engaged, as she moves to each of the windows, keeping out of the street’s line of sight but clearly checking for danger, for  _something._

Beth was always single-minded in her desire to keep Alison safe, although the soccer mom is no longer sure of this woman’s agenda and priorities.  _To keep safe? Or to hunt and kill?_ She doesn’t know.

She feels as though her thoughts are tangled around each other in desperation for answers, getting nowhere at all.

Alison watches Beth from her place by the door, beginning to shake in her pyjamas, bare feet stark white against the craft room floor.  _Am I going into shock? Is this shock? If Beth didn’t die at Huxley Station, which one us did?_  

She moves to raise her hand, a jerky gesture reminiscent of a shy student asking a question in class.

            “Uh. Um! Y-yes. Excuse me?” She laughs softly, in her usual self-deprecating high pitch; Alison has never been one for obeying orders and understanding the gravity of situations. This time is no different, Beth turns around slowly, almost in disbelief, and appears to deflate in resignation. She does, however, raise her chin slightly in an invitation to continue.

            “Hmm! Yes. Beth. I was just w-wondering!” Alison smiles tightly. “How is it that y-you’re… alive?” Her right hand moves to rest anxiously at her cheek, fluttering slightly like a butterfly, “Y-you see, I was, uh, told otherwise.”

Beth places the gun back into her waistband, clicking the safety on, obviously satisfied at the absence of immediate danger.

The room is still as cold as ice; Beth hasn’t relaxed. She remains a frozen echo of the woman Alison remembers. 

Beth smiles in a hideously forced way, as if talking to a small child, and walks closer to Alison. The blood on her cheek shines oddly in the light from the craft-room ceiling. There's memory of something awful in that blood, Alison thinks, as the fierce woman's mouth opens to speak. There is too much darkness caught in the fine lines of her face. Her voice is smooth and dangerous again. Alison hates her for it. Hates her for everything.

            “Alison. I’m sure you can understand exactly how much of a long story that’s going to be, and I can promise that we’ll get there eventually. But all you need to know for now is that I know exactly what you’ve been told, and that’s sufficient. The rest is not your concern.”

Alison looks up at her with wide eyes, Beth’s words sinking in.

The blood has dried into the lines around her eyes, the ones that used to crinkle with laughter and teasing grins.

Alison takes a step backwards, feeling her heels hit the firmly closed door behind her. _Shit._

            “What do you mean?” Her voice comes out more hysterical than she’d hoped. “You p-planned this?” The other woman doesn’t answer, eyes falling into shadow as she inclines her head. “Beth?”

            “Nothing is ever as planned as we hope. But yes, I did, in the way that you mean.”

Beth’s flat tone and lack of emotion hits the intensity of Alison’s growing betrayal like gasoline to flame. The craft room is no longer an oasis of muted grief; the short, pyjama-clad woman hits her like a small tonne of bricks, loud and seething with fury.

            “How could you,” she shrieks into Beth’s face, small fists hammering into her chest with desperate energy, eyes flashing wildly white. “ How could you  _leave_ me like that? H-how could you! Have you any idea what I’ve been like these last six months. You  _let_ me think that you had  _died!_ Does that even compute with you? You inflicted this  _pain_ on me willingly.”

Her voice turns into sobs, body curling into a desperately sad, shaking shell. Her next words are hesitant but spat with every ounce of hatred she can muster: “Fuck you, Beth Childs.”

Alison has never sworn before, Beth knows that. She saves it for special occasions. On this particular one she has chosen poorly, Alison Hendrix has done nothing but flick a match to Beth’s sadness. There’s nothing like the ugly truth to break hearts.

The taller woman’s eyes flash with pain and outrage, even as Alison’s words fade away in the half-shadowed room. She surges forward with an animal violence. Alison finds herself thrown against the hard wooden door, Beth’s hands at her throat, head bouncing backwards hard enough that she sees stars. The blood-splattered clone’s voice is a growl into Alison’s fear. 

            “It was never that easy.  _Never.”_

Alison’s eyes are terrified and wide, lower lip trembling as she stares straight into her own face. She can feel blood trickling down her neck from the back of her head, ears ringing. 

\There is nothing more painful than a sacrifice to those you love. But painful too, is the need to save oneself before all others//

 Alison just doesn’t know which one Beth chose to rely upon.


	3. I'd scream into silence for you but you're gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> smuuuuuuuuuuuuuut. I hate myself.

~~

Morning comes relentlessly and Beth Childs has finally broken down.

They’re in the kitchen, Alison holding a cold towel to her bleeding head by the stove and Beth shaking at the counter-top.

The cop is trembling violently, pale hands curled like claws against the marble of the kitchen bench and head bowed down against them.

She hasn’t spoken since crumbling to the craft room floor seconds after hurting Alison. She seems to have placed walls of shock and fear around herself, not responding to anything Alison says. The soccer mum is exhausted, grief finally running her anger dry. The silence bites stale on her tongue.

She glances over at Beth. How could this woman come home so different, so emptily sad? The difference is shocking, so empty and unnecessary. She sighs into the morning’s air and forces herself to look away from the stranger at her table.

Beth Childs was always an arrogant tease, often gentle, always patient. She’d chew gum and bite her fingernails if she was nervous, call Art Bell a dipshit with a sweet smile on her face, and always told Alison that she loved her with a voice as soft as snowbells in spring, and just as delicate.

The woman at her table is a shadow of she who grinned before.

Alison can feel tears threatening her eyes and she places the back of a trembling hand to her forehead with a shaky exhale.

“Oh!” She murmurs to herself. “Stop it.” _Stop it, stop it, stop it._

The kettle begins to whistle loudly as the water comes to a boil, making the tiny woman beside it jerk her head up, as if realising where she was.

~

When at a loss of what else to do, Alison Hendrix makes tea.

~

Beth finally lifts her head when Alison places the toast and tea in front of her with an echoing clunk. Her eyes are red; face tear-stained and scared looking up at Alison as if she doesn’t want to see anything at all.

The blood has washed into her white shirtsleeves, arms resting below her, a bright scarlet reminder of something awful. It’s a startling colour against the crisp white.

Alison doesn’t know whose blood it is and how it came to be on Beth’s face. But she knows it can’t be good. Blood is never good.

 ~

She remembers a day in the park, when Beth started to cry.

It turned out to be only days before she supposedly jumped in front of that train, and Alison berated herself for months afterwards. She just kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, if she had said something that day, Beth wouldn’t have done it. _If only I’d known._

They’d been by the lake, a beautiful wide pond that the council had allowed in the local park. The Ducks loved it. And still do, Alison supposes, but she’s never been able to bring herself to go back.

Beth had smiled that day as they stood by the silvery water, gently, so gently, and kissed her. It was sweet, and soft. Warm like the love they’d somehow discovered in each others’ loneliness. But it felt like a goodbye, that kiss. It touched the edge of an awful frost, like a whisper of pain to come.

And then Beth Childs cried, huge wracking sobs that brought her to her knees. Alison had gripped her shoulders, as if trying to hold her together, and felt completely helpless.

Beth shook like a leaf in Alison’s arms, like she’d seen a future of utter hopelessness and desolate ruin from which she couldn’t return. Alison had never seen grief painted so brightly on anyone before that day as Beth had choked in pain and wept for love and fear.

Alison, _stupid suburban Alison,_ had not known what to say.

 

~~~~~

The kitchen sparkles with morning light now, the sun crawling up into the sky properly and staking a claim in the stretch of blue.

Beth takes a sip of tea, looking at Alison's frightened face across the kitchen counter. There's a stretch of marble between them, dark and patterned with deep swirls of cold. Her wrists rest on the surface in their blood-stained sleeves. She has stopped shaking, returning to a steely calm that scares Alison more than anything. 

            “It’s not what you think. Not entirely.” Her voice is softer and riddled with a familiar huskiness now. She sounds more like herself, to Alison, at least.

“I had to leave.” She looks up at Alison with hazel-green sincerity. “Things were complicated with Paul. It was awful Alison, I promise you. I wouldn’t have done it if it didn’t mean the only way to make sure all of you were safe. I just- shit- I found out far more than I bargained for… and I couldn’t deal with it here, with you-”

            “With me…” Alison’s voice comes out shrill. “Nice, Elizabeth. Really nice.”

Beth’s eyes flash with a desperate kind of remorse. As if she’s frustrated with her own slip.

            “You know that’s not what I meant, Ali.” She slips off the kitchen stool, placing her tea back on the table, and walks slowly towards Alison.

The shorter woman grips her mug of tea with determined apathy, refusing to look at Beth as she approaches. Her steps are fluid, well oiled, and oozing confidence. The shape of her figure ripples in morning light and is elusive to definition. Beth has always been like this though. Quicksilver.

Soon she’s too close to ignore, gently taking the steaming cup out of Alison’s pale fingers and putting it aside. Her breath gusts sweetly against Alison’s cheeks as she takes the shorter woman’s hands gently into her own and presses them together to stop the tremble.

Alison can feel Beth’s cold fingers slide into the spaces between her own with practiced ease and the soccer mum closes her eyes against the touch, lips trembling with memory. She jerks her hands away, holding fast to the solid surface behind her. 

            “B-beth-”

            “Shhhh, Ali. It’s okay. I’m here now.”

Beth’s body is so close to her own, still, that Alison can feel the heat of her skin, even through the fabric of their clothes. She takes a shallow breath, overcome with the need to press against Beth’s familiar frame, to feel the life of her, to arch into someone so soft and gentle and sweet.

She grips the counter behind her with white knuckles, willing herself not to reach out and succumb to her growing desperation. It aches in a familiar way between her legs and paints her cheeks with shame. Her mind dances to memories that all began this way. Beth getting close to her until something ignites. It’s sweet torture.

Alison knows that these thoughts inevitably descend into imageless soundtracks of desperate gasps and moans. But she can’t shut out the colours. Past Beth would press her back up against the craft room wall and tangle ribbons in her hair whilst moving her hand across hot skin and lower, lower still- _Oh god!_

Alison opens her eyes slowly, breath coming fast and cheeks flushed. She’s embarrassed, unsure of how much time has passed and dizzy with the tightness spreading its way across the planes of her stomach and clenching painfully in her thighs.

Her vision is filled with Beth, when her eyelash-pillowed sight returns. Her eyes are dark and flecked with that familiar green, staring softly at Alison, so gentle, just as she remembers. Beth takes her hesitation as permission, bringing a hand up to cradle her cheek. The contact is all that Alison needs to spiral into breathless _want_.

She’s breathless when Beth moves fast into her, a mirror of action, crashing their lips together with unbearable fire. It’s all too slow, she’s gasping into the taller woman’s mouth and balling a fist into her shirt.

Breathless too is Alison’s teeth grazing Beth’s lips with a groan, she’s pressing into her with an animal intent that makes the other woman’s eyes roll up into her skull, thoughts coming white hot and fast with the harmony of impatience.

They’re all roll and shiver, the pain of want making Alison mewl into Beth’s every kiss. The cop stretches hungry fingers against the swell of her breast, moving her face down into the hollow of her neck to trace scalding kisses into waiting skin. Alison arches into the caress, body leaving the kitchen bench entirely and tumbling forward with a gasp. They’re falling, laughter mingling with breath, and grabbing at furniture.

            “Shit!”

Beth’s on the tiled floor now, hissing as the cold surface burns the exposed skin of her back, but laughing at the contrast of cold. She takes her shirt off entirely then, surging upwards to pull Alison against her, desperate fingers gripping ribs.

Somewhere along the way Alison has lost her pyjama top, but she doesn’t mind in the slightest as her bare skin touches Beth’s and the heat sears into wherever her tears used to live. She’s forgotten fear, grief, sadness. Hell, Alison Hendrix can hardly remember who she is. Especially when the cop below her traces an exposed hipbone with painfully slow delicacy and cold fingertips.

She bucks into the touch, hands urging Beth’s to move lower. And the cop complies, strong fingers pressing softly right where Alison needs it most. She moans into the kitchen air, morning sun striping her back with delicious warmth like a ghostly touch against her bare skin, the sound bouncing off the walls.

            “F-fuck. B-beth!”

They shatter then, falling into the flux of sound and swell. It’s a jerked ballet, filling the holes between each woman’s ribs that were torn by icy lies in the months before. Alison is exactly where she dreamt herself, the same embrace, every night since Beth had left. The reality is sweeter though, iced with adoration and patterned with a candied touch.

The kitchen is a symphony of relief, love, pleasure. Alison’s mind is a wordless sigh.

_My ghost came home._

 

 


	4. once I was an awful girl in love (help me)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth remembers how it feels to burn and wonders if her heart’s coming back.

Beth squints into the brightness of noon as she closes the Hendrix’s back door behind her. It’s a familiar action; before she left it was almost a daily occurrence. Alison could be needy when she was sad, you see.

It was a tired routine. She would call Beth as soon as Donnie left for his afternoon shift and drag her stiffly inside when she heard the tap of leather boots on suburban brick that announced the detective’s arrival.

A press of lips is not always effective medication though, especially when every touch of tongue tastes like fear.

And hell, they were experts on fear.

Poor Alison, Beth thinks to herself, the soccer mum was always in denial and desperately clinging to wreckage as she slowly drowned: so blind to the truth of motive and cruelty.

She had always been naïve in her wide-eyed love. It was evident in the way she made breakfast food whilst dancing around the kitchen to show tunes. Beth had hated that, the soundtrack, but adored the way that Sunday morning breakfast occasions meant that they were alone. Adored the sway of Alison’s hips wearing nothing but a battered, borrowed Toronto PD t-shirt and her pink underpants.

Alison would look over her shoulder with a pancake cooking in the pan below her and grin, poking her tongue behind her teeth and letting her brown eyes positively~ sparkle~ with love.

 _Idiot._  That was the only time they were ever happy. At least that’s all Beth can remember. She never was very good at  _happy_  anyway…

Beth smiles wryly. She’s not happy this morning, only satisfied. Last night was a beautiful mess of lies that succeeded; Alison gobbling up the sentimental crap with teary-eyed earnestness.

Beth felt nothing. But she can see how the suburban princess could believe her story.

_~I had to leave… I wouldn’t have done unless it was the only way to keep you safe…~_

Alison never had a very good bullshit detector. She could really use one now days.

And what of guilt? Of morals?

This Beth Childs, resurrected, doesn’t have room for remorse. Was Ali really so stupid that she couldn’t understand that? After everything that happened, the diagnosis, Paul, the drugs, the moments that she was  _nobody,_ the moments that she didn’t know which way was up. All of it was taking up room. Now Beth doesn’t need to feel anything at all. And that in itself is some kind of freedom. 

The day has warmed considerably, cold, pale sunlight combating the creeping chill of late autumn. Beth pulls her jacket around herself. It didn’t take much for Alison to throw her out. Nothing but the sound of a heavy tread on the second floor of her house and a toilet flushing, all announcing the alarming fact that Donnie was awake and upstairs. Alison had evidently forgotten this rather important fact whilst- uh- otherwise occupied.

Before she left it was a similar routine if things had dragged on and Beth had slept over when it wasn’t a sleepy, _safe_  Sunday. The soccer mum returned to duty on those mornings with a lurch of realisation, shaking Beth awake with a high-pitched reminder of their respective lives. Both of them were always dressing in the finest veneer of lies, pretending that they weren’t crumbling in. The morning was just a way to see that in the starkest light.

Beth shakes her head at the memory. Feelings had taken so much room then, clinging to the flush on Alison’s cheeks and bouncing off the way she would purr Beth’s name in the darkness.

A breath of wind tousles the cop’s hair. The suburban houses look at her disapprovingly, as if they had overheard her thoughts. Beth’s boots feel heavy and they judder off the bitumen road with a rough pain. The leaves caught in every gutter rustle with a restlessness that mirrors her mind.

Beth Childs feels dizzy and she’s scared again.  _It’s all Alison’s fault._ How much longer will her tired heart beat out its empty freedom?

Because it _is_  empty, she thinks tiredly. It’s the same breed of exhaustion that started eating her bones three months ago. Ali had noticed back then too, blaming herself for Beth’s flickers from gentle and sad to terrified and all the way back again.

She remembers the weeks when it got really bad, when she’d make excuses and steal downstairs in the middle of the night, taking the bottles from Paul’s liquor cabinet.

It was anaesthetic, she told herself, as she crouched by the cold glass windows of their apartment, shaking knees drawn up to her chin. Beth knew that it was dangerous; every swallow burnt her throat and beat slower into her veins, making her heart settle achingly comfortable in her ruined chest.

She had just grown tired of the roller-coaster, of pretending she didn’t hear Ali crying next to her after the cop had said things she didn’t mean. Beth just got tired of the way she’d panic, turn into a flighty animal and cry desperately into a howl of pain. She can imagine how terrifying it must have been for Alison. She knows it now; Beth can picture all of the shit from this safe vantage point; the present.

It’s selfish. She knows that she’s still making excuses.

Beth finds herself gasping with the painful memory into the still-cold afternoon. She can see her car, a dark green jaguar, parked at the end of the street she’s just turned down; Paul had picked it out for her, unsmiling, back when he was trying to buy her affection. It all seemed so desperate. It’s a wonder her alarm bells hadn’t sounded immediately.

Beth remembers how sweet and unknowing she was back then and feels an awful nostalgia and grief for her old self.

 _Breathe, Beth,_ she tells herself;  _you just need to get to the end of this street._ Her breath clouds around her, thick enough to form a grey halo around her head. It’s almost like it’s picking her out; marking her as a target.

_So shoot me._

Beth had always taken the world as a challenge. 


	5. bottles and blood (can you come over?)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth has done something terrible. Alison can’t breathe.

~~~~~~

It’s three days before Alison hears from Beth again. The call comes late, when her bedroom is striped with moonlight and Donnie is still not home. She doesn’t mind that last fact at all, mind you.

Their recently rekindled relationship has deflated a little since they buried Dr Leekie and Alison is doing her best to remain the same as before, even with a returned and unstable Beth hovering in her subconscious. It isn’t easy.

            “Hello?” Alison’s voice is soft with sleep and she yawns as quietly as she can into the receiver.

            “Alison.” The voice is unmistakable and steely with a desperate focus.

            “Beth?”

            “I’ve done something terrible. I-I need y-your help.”

Alison freezes, hand clenched tightly on the phone’s suddenly very smooth and cold surface. Her breath burns with fear, a knowing apprehension.

            “Oh god. What is it?”

She remembers a call just like this one; it must be around a year ago now. A call that held the same kind of desperation as tonight’s, only weaker, sadder, Beth’s voice spelling out exactly what kind of mistake she had made. That night broke into pill bottles and a crumbled body in the middle of Beth’s apartment. It’s lucky Alison had her own keys.

            “I’ve hurt Paul.”

Beth’s voice is relentless in its truth, pulling her back to reality, the cold night creeping against the skin not covered by pink pyjamas.

Alison puffs out a tiny breath of panic, swallowing the blossoming feeling back down painfully and closing her eyes. She resists the urge to scream down the phone line with accusations and worry.

_Under what circumstances did this happen? Are you hurt? What were you thinking, Elizabeth?_

But she doesn’t.

            “How badly.”

There’s ringing silence on the end of the phone.

            “Beth? Tell me!”

Alison can only hear Beth breathing on the other end. It feels like hours before the cop’s voice sounds again.

            “I just need you to come over okay. I’ll tell you everything then.”

The line goes dead then, dropping into silence with nothing but a cough of static.

Alison, eyes wide, stares at the wall above her bedside table in the silence that follows. There’s nothing projected on the white expanse, but she sees blood, a red blossom of blood, spreading over the wallpaper and dripping thickly down to the carpet. It’s not real. It’s the most real thing she’s ever seen; everything smells like death and fear.

_Am I going mad?_

_~_ ~

Beth stares down at the charcoal grey tiles of her apartment’s kitchenette. It’s been a while since she’s seen the inside of this place, four walls of bad memories and a liar.

Every dust mote tastes like sadness here, she thinks sadly, but the light plays a pale moonlight dance across every surface with a lazy lilt. It’s almost beautiful.

Paul’s lying, crumpled, like a broken doll at the base of the kitchen counter. She looks down at him with a frown and tries to feel guilty.

It doesn’t work.

She feels like she’s eaten stones, a congregation of granite weighing her stomach down with second-hand discomfort. Beth’s breath is still coming quickly, the exertion of past struggle still humming in her muscles.

_The impact of her fist hitting muscle burns with a delicious pain. Beth Childs feels infinite, she feels free. The man before her is begging and whining with no shame. What a gross show of weakness, she thinks, how the mighty have fallen._

_“Beth! Don’t hurt me, please!”_

_“It never stopped_ you _before, liar.”_

 _Paul is doubled up with the blow Beth has just delivered to his chest. His panicked breathing sounds a lot like Beth’s sobs every night in the months before she left; curled up and crying beside him. The sound never bothered him, so Beth can’t help but wonder how he feels now that he has the same panic tearing_ his _throat out. She smiles._

_“Are you crying, Paul?”_

_He doesn’t answer. Beth stops smiling._

_“I said. Are you crying, you piece of shit? Answer me!”_

_Her voice is rough, breaking through octaves and ripping the quiet of the kitchen apart into chaos. Paul flinches at the sound with damp eyes and quivering hands raised above his head in a broken man’s defence._

_“It’s easy to give up, isn’t it Paul.” Beth shakes her head in mock solemnity and picks up the bottle of wine sitting unopened on the kitchen bench. She moves around him, ignoring the whimper of fear as she brushes past with purpose, and reaches for a glass in the cupboard above the sink. “I should know all about that, me of all people.”_

_The liquid weaving its way into Beth’s glass like a stream of silk looks an awful lot like blood in the eerie light._

_Oh ghost, you’re red wine, dead and hard to find._

_“How did you feel, Paul, when Sarah told you that I had jumped in front of a train because of you?”_

_Paul looks up at this, handsome face all harsh angles and lines of stoic cruelty. He looks surprised for the first time tonight._

_“How do you know that?”_

_Beth laughs, soft, vulnerable. For a second it’s an echo of the Beth that he met, ten years ago, giggling in the park over a picnic. The sound breaks something deep in his chest._

_“I know a lot of things. That much is certain. But you know about keeping secrets, don’t you Paul, you know all about that. Don’t start judging me now.”_

_She screws the lid back of the wine bottle slowly, beginning to hum to herself. It’s an old melody, something about its wistful quality breathes nostalgia fiercely into Beth’s veins._

_She moves slowly, lifting the bottle above her head where the light catches it, painted like a falling star._

_It hangs in static beauty for a second, Paul putting the pieces together with a hoarse shout of fear. It doesn’t effect Beth enough. She brings the bottle down on his army regulation haircut with a strength she never knew she possessed._

_It crawls from her gut like a dark animal and roars with hot fire, like an answer to the hiss of blood that is now making its way in slow motion across the kitchen bench and down the white cupboard doors. Beth Childs feels free and her chest screams in victory._

There’s a knock at the door.

Beth looks up from the body; she’s still staring, kept fascinated with phantom movie scenes and blood smears. Her face is painted again with the scarlet pattern that has been her constant nightmare since she went away and she can feel its sticky reminder on her eyelids.  _I must’ve closed my eyes on impact._

_Why did I do that?_

She breathes out slowly through her mouth, relishing the movement of air against her teeth. She stands up and remembers the knock at the door. Beth is losing moments in falling shards of invisible glass.

The apartment feels like a maze to her as she moves towards the door that hides her own face from its newly gruesome mirror. It is a curse to know things, she tells herself, you mustn’t forget that.

When Beth opens the door, Alison is standing there with a bulging garbage bag. The cop looks at it questioningly, raising one eyebrow and trying not to smile with the sudden relief seeing Alison has brought her.

            “Cleaning supplies,” The soccer mum says brightly, and steps inside the apartment with a determined shine in her eyes. “Everything will be okay, Elizabeth. I promise.

But promises had never done Beth Childs any good. She tries not to cry. 


End file.
